Social media marketing on the increase in Asia but issues remain

Social media marketing in Asia has doubled in the last year however companies in the region are still to master the potential of the medium, according to a new report from Burson Marsteller.

The public relations firm found that 81 percent of the companies listed on The Wall Street Journal’s Asia 200 Index use social media, which is up from 40 percent in 2010, however it also identifies a number of issues around the use of the channel in the region.

Many companies in Asia are not making use of social media as part of a long term plan, according to the report which finds 62 percent of the social media accounts recorded to be inactive. Equally, “the great majority” of active accounts are updated infrequently having been set-up for short-term marketing initiatives.

Of those that are active, the report concludes that strategy is lacking with firms not adapting their communications to the demands of new media. One third of the companies using social media are focused on basic outreach to media and influencers through ‘pushed’ messages – chiefly around new products – while many fail to create new channels for corporate news, instead piping all communication to consumer audiences.

Social networks and microblogging – which includes China’s Sina weibo and Tencent weibo as well as Twitter – were unsurprisingly the most used mediums across the seven markets, although the use of video grew significantly as the chart below shows.

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